


if history hang hang hangs her

by lescousinsdangereux, sexonastick



Category: Pitch Perfect (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cinderella, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Little Red Riding Hood, Big Bad Wolf Metaphors, F/F, Too Many Metaphors Probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 15:59:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lescousinsdangereux/pseuds/lescousinsdangereux, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sexonastick/pseuds/sexonastick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn’t anything like the stories you’ve heard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if history hang hang hangs her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Care](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Care/gifts).



> Cuz wants me to emphasize that this is a one shot -- a birthday present at that -- which I think means she gets harassed far too often to write more for stories she's finished with.
> 
> So I'm only posting under the assumption you guys can be ON YOUR BEST BEHAVIOR.

 

_She damned if she do_

_She damned if she don't_

_If history hang hang hangs her well_

_Her memory won't -_ The Kills, _Damned If She Do_

 

 

 

* * *

 

It isn't anything like the stories, and most days Chloe is grateful for that. In the stories the poor girl from the broken home doesn't end up ruling the kingdom.

Not that she's ruling anything yet. 

She's only in line to ascend, and with the way her prince is carrying on, it's starting to seem unlikely. Divorce, while certainly scandalous, is hardly unheard of for royalty. (A great many things aren't unheard of for royalty.) It's why her prince's infidelities are considered such a minor affair by everyone at court.

Everyone but Chloe.

Tom hadn't always been this way. There was a time when his priorities were different. He had been concerned with justice and fair play. Kindness and generosity.

He had been charming.

*

Charming enough that he’d not commented on the roughness of her hands when they danced, nor laughed as he picked the ash out of her hair when he’d found her again. 

But not so charming as to forgive Chloe for the things she’d lost. 

(Given up.) 

*

Nothing is free, and this is something she’s always known. 

(Or, known since she was young; inheriting beautiful glass slippers that her feet could not yet fit. All it took was a mother who would not be alive to watch as Chloe grew into them.)  

Nothing is free, but sometimes you can fool yourself into thinking you have prepaid for the things you are suddenly given.  

And Chloe had fooled herself into thinking that a few (twelve years of) nights spent alongside the dying embers of a stone fireplace and a couple (four thousand three hundred and eighty) days of wiping floors with rags soaked in skin-cracking bleach had been built up enough credit for her to afford a happy ending.  

It almost hurts worse because she should have known.

*

Tom had been charming and everyone says that he still is. 

He still smiles brightly and easily, and flatters her with gifts of blue silk and clear glass. And if he does not often return to their bed at night, what does it really matter? 

What’s a bit of infidelity when it’s for the good of the kingdom?

*

(He’s _keeping_ her, after all. 

Not throwing her out of the castle. 

What more could a poor maid girl with a barren womb want?)

 

 

* * *

 

Like most of the best stories, it had started with a lie.

*

It's easy enough to kill a wolf. You just have to know where to aim for maximum damage.

Getting rid of a man, however, is hard work.

More dangerous than any animal is what one angry person can do to another when heartsick. Sometimes they can devour your life from the inside out. 

*

Jesse had never even wanted to _be_ a huntsman, but he wasn't good at much else. At least, that's according to his mother, whom Beca met just the one time.

It was perhaps the first sign that their relationship—if that's even what it was—would be doomed when she heard Beca's name at that first meeting, and spat into the fireplace. 

Not many people were impressed with the girl who wanders alone into the woods and gets herself eaten up whole by a very dangerous beast in the dark.

That isn't really how it went, of course.

*

Before he left Beca and her mother to fend for themselves, Mr. Mitchell had taught her to swing an axe. The important thing really is follow through. (This is often something that Beca lacks now, but at that time she had been fully committed.)

Splitting logs to make a fire for mother and father to cook on had made her feel useful. Part of the family.

That was when there had still _been_ a family to belong to. 

They would eat together and send secret smiles across the table.

When father would tickle her, his hands were steady and sure, and she'd wriggle and squirm until the hair fell into her face and her chest ached with laughter.

*

Follow through, a precise hip pivot, and careful aim.

After her father left, little Beca had imagined that every log she split in two was his skull.

She heard the people in the town whispering about her. The angry vicious little beast girl with the nasty scowl and quick temper. Some even said she was a witch.

Good. Let them keep their distance.

People who are already far away are impossible to lose.

*

She had never wanted to work in the woods felling trees—not after all that—but it became hard finding extra income without her father to put food on the table.

At least she could put something he taught her to good use.

The axe made her arms stronger, if a little lumpy and somewhat knotted. She would always be short, but now she seemed almost formidable, even though she was still slight enough to sway in a heavy breeze.

With the axe firm in her grip, fit against the grooves of worn blisters, she wasn't afraid. 

Not of anything.

Especially not a man screaming in the darkness.

In the forest, that is often times a sign to run, and Beca had.

She ran _toward_ the screams, further into the dark.

*

Jesse had never wanted to be a huntsman. He was slow with an axe and awkward with a bow, but his skill at carpentry was even worse and as a bricklayer he had lasted only a month.

A poor farmer's son isn't given the luxury to choose any path his heart could fancy. This is something they _both_ understood from the very first meeting.

Well, maybe the second.

The first thing Beca knew of Jesse was the hot copper smell of blood awash in the air and the sound of his screams to guide her. Normally, the wolves of the forest were kind enough. They could even be gentle.

Maybe _this_ was, in fact, the first sign that they were doomed. The wolf was unusually angry, and unwilling to let it go. It had tasted blood and now it was frantic for more.

And Jesse reeked of it.

*

Which was fine. It was good.

It provided the distraction Beca needed to land her axe directly in the back of the wolf's skull.

Thinking of her father's lessons—

( _Shift from your center_ )

—and also of her father's head—

( _Slow, controlled breaths in and out_ )

— and maybe she had been screaming too. Perhaps that's where the story had started.

Both their voices mingled together in frantic shouts and the blood washed up her arm from wrist to elbow as she dug inside the wolf's chest cavity in search of the tenderest meat.

*

(Her hood hadn't been red. Not originally. But it was heavy with blood—stiff and stained with it—and after it had been easy to take it on as an identity. Crazed beast girl of the forest with her red hood and foolish choices.

She might be a witch, or just another common whore, but the rumors started quickly that there was something growing in her belly. Half-canine, all monstrous.)

*

He was so angry when he found the herbs she had been taking in her tea. 

_The child_ , he had said the first time, but then—louder, and with increasing conviction—it had only been, _My son_.

That was the long and short of it. 

Beca's womb was empty now. For all she could know, it always had been. 

But he had smiled when he imagined the little heart that _might_ be beating inside of her. It brought him greater joy than the very real pulsing he could feel beneath his fingers when his hand gripped at her chest.

He didn't smile at her after that. 

No one really did.

 

 

* * *

 

Nothing about Tom's extramarital activities is acceptable, no matter what excuse he might have. But faithlessness does, at least, keep him busy, which gives Chloe plenty of time to explore.  

She starts with the castle—meeting everyone in it, learning of the rituals and procedures that Tom would not have been able to explain to her even had he asked –but that takes only a couple months, and then she's on to the castle grounds, and not long after, the city and surrounding woods. 

Turns out, you can learn a lot about just about anything if you ask the right questions and wear a cloak that covers what might otherwise be distinctive features (red hair, most of all, but also the style of dress a supposed Queen-to-be is meant to wear). 

So that's how she meets Beca. 

(By asking the right questions; namely, 'who are you?' and 'can I come?'. 

But also luck. She's not about to discount luck.

 Or fate.)

*

She knows the tale, of course (who doesn’t?)—Little Red Riding Hood and the Huntsman and the Wolf and all the deception and incredulity that goes with a fairy tale. Chloe’s learned to accept the stories— after witnessing a pumpkin turn into a carriage, she’s had little choice in the matter—but she knows as well as anyone (better than, really) that they often come with a deeper layer known to no one but those who live them out. 

She knows the tales sometimes focus on the wrong things. 

(The prince and true love instead of the blisters on her hands and the scabs on her knees that came before; benevolent fairy godmothers without ulterior motive instead of carefully worded deals that girls with seemingly nothing to lose might not read so prudently; happily ever after instead of… whatever she has now.) 

So she knows the tale and she knows the hood and so she knows the girl (woman), even if it takes Chloe far longer than it perhaps should for her to come to the conclusion that she is _talking_ to her. 

Probably because she’s a little distracted by the axe. 

(And the muscles.) 

(And the eyes.) 

(And the smirk.

 Definitely the smirk.) 

Correction: probably because she’s _really_ distracted. 

*

It’s the sound of wood splitting that catches her attention first.

The sun is lowering in the sky, but the air is still warm with the remnants of midday, and the shade of the forest beckons her. (Not as much as the sight she will soon come across, but it is the shade that calls her first.) There are tales told about the forest—tales of snares and shadows and, yes, wolves—but Chloe feels little fear in the light of the day, with the village in the near distance, even when the sudden crack breaks the silence of the afternoon.

Still, it’s probably not the _smartest_ move to move in the direction of the loud noise—further into the forest—but Chloe’s never been the most cautious person (doubly so when bored or impatient). And it really works out for her this time around, or so she thinks when she sees the woman with the really impressive arms spitting a log with a single chop.

If nothing else, it’s a striking sight.

But it’s a curious one as well.

So no, Chloe’s never been the most cautious person, but at least she waits until the woman has completed another downward swing before taking a step towards her and raising her voice enough to call out with a chipper greeting.

The woman spins like she’s someone who’s not used to being surprised, or, at least, someone who knows the danger of being caught off guard, and that’s the first thing (beyond the axe and arms and eyes) that Chloe takes notice of, because she can appreciate that, as someone who has never quite learned the same lesson.

Which is probably why she’s approaching a complete stranger—an axe-wielding stranger—in the middle of the woods.

Still, the woman’s wary hello and tight smile that come in return are not a deterrent.

(Just the opposite.)

“Hello,” Chloe says again. “Who are you?”

That is (right) question number one, and even if Chloe later realizes she should have known the answer, she does not (ever) regret asking it.

Even if the woman does not have much of an answer for her.

“What kind of question is that?” 

The sun is flooding through the gaps in the trees, and the woman shields her eyes against it (in vain); her eyes are dark even now, but the blue hue is evident in the light.

“An introductory one,” Chloe replies easily. “A question one might ask of someone they do not know.”

“A question one might ask of someone they happen to come across while stumbling around, alone, in the middle of the woods?”

The hesitant smile is loosening, Chloe can see, being replaced by a slight smirk that she likes a great deal more.

“I do not stumble.” Unless running down stone steps in glass heels, but so would anyone in that situation. “And we are hardly in the middle of the woods.” She pauses. “But yes.” 

It’s definitely a smirk now, on the woman’s face.

“Fine then, woman who is not-stumbling along the outskirts of the woods—you first. Who are you?”

Okay. Fine. It’s a harder question to answer than Chloe would have otherwise thought. Especially when dark blue eyes are so intently waiting for the answer. So she goes with the easiest response, even if it doesn’t fully answer the question.

“I’m Chloe.”

“Chloe,” the woman repeats slowly, and Chloe nods, as if in confirmation—as though it’s more of an answer when coming from those lips. “I’m Beca.”

*

And that’s how Cinderella meets Little Red Riding Hood.

*

She doesn’t realize it until she sees the hood, of course.

It’s a darker red than she expects. But a lot about Beca is different than what someone might expect. It’s probably in the curve of her smile (smirk) that is both softer and sharper than Chloe is expecting, and the assuredness of some of her gestures (the downward swing of her axe) and the uncertainty of others (the way she offers Chloe her canteen after taking a drink from it herself). Beca is not much like the person the stories would cast her as, and Chloe realizes that quite quickly.

But still, when she sees the cloak, not ten minutes after meeting the woman it belongs to, she implies otherwise.

“Oh!” The sight is one that might cause most people to take a step back, but it propels Chloe forward instead. “I know you!”

Beca’s response reminds her though—a slight smirk and a few casual words (“Do you?”) – that no, she really doesn’t.

* 

She would like to.

That’s uncontested.  She would very much like to get to know Beca.

And that’s probably why she spends until sunrise asking question after question and receiving just enough in return to keep her going, searching for more of Beca’s truths. Until Beca is looking up at the sky in something akin to concern and her dark blue eyes are on Chloe and she’s asking her if she has some place to go and—

It’s sweet. Unexpected. And very sweet.

Of course, Chloe ruins it by _laughing_ , but the castle is in the distance and it’s so ridiculously oversized and ostentatious and _yes_ she has somewhere to go, she would just really prefer never to go there again. But how is she supposed to explain that to Beca? Beca, who is looking a bit put out by her laughter and is hefting her axe onto her shoulder and mumbling something about going home, and then she doesn’t have time to explain anyway because that’s when Chloe asks Right Question number two, even if it’s so very, very inappropriate and presumptuous and not at all polite.

“Can I come?”

There’s a pause, and Chloe’s sure she will be denied, but instead she receives a slight smile and an easy shrug.

“Sure.”

*

And so that’s how Cinderella invites herself over to Red Riding Hood’s cottage in the woods.   

(For the first time.)    


End file.
